This head dress, belongs to the so called “David Gorodok-Turov” style – a complex of traditional Belarusian folk costumes of the Polesye.

The area where we find this style of traditional folk dress lies along the Pripyat River, which flows east through Ukraine, then through Belarus parallel to Ukraine border, and then Ukraine again, draining into the Dnieper.

Along the river lie the Pinsk Marshes, a vast natural region of wetlands along the forested basin of the Pripyat River and its tributaries from Brest to the west to Mogilev to the northeast and Kiev to the southeast. It is one of the largest wetland areas of Europe.

Now here is something very very interesting indeed. My friend Sima Kosminski sent me a link to this article, which contains an interview with a couple from Lelikov near Kobrin in Polesye.

They are Peter and Anastasia Shapetsyuki – known collectors of local folklore.

Like other people in Polesye, who wear this “David Gorodok-Turov” style of traditional folk costume, they apparently speak their own unique dialect which is different from the dialects of the neighboring population. And they have a very interesting legend that explains why their language is different:

“Serb tribes were great enemies of the Romans. Finally a Roman emperor got really angry and sent an army to attack them. The Serbs were driven out of their homeland and came and settled down here, in the Pinsk Marshes, in Polesye…”

Now what Serbs and what Romans is this legend talking about? Balkan Serbs and Romans? Or Baltic Sorbs and Holy Roman Empire? Both groups of Serbian tribes were indeed great enemies of their “Romans” and waged centuries long wars against invading “Romans”. So both are very good candidates to be “the Serbs” from the legend.

What is interesting, judging by this map from Eupedia, it seems that genetically Polesyans are definitively linked to Balkan Serbs:

What do you think?

This is a very very interesting development, don’t you think so?

Does anyone have any additional information about this legend or about Polesye culture and language?

The absence of snakes in Ireland gave rise to the legend that they had all been banished by St. Patrick, He chased them into the sea after they attacked him during a 40-day fast he was undertaking on top of Mt Croagh Patrick.

The problem is all evidence suggests that post-glacial Ireland never had snakes. So maybe the snakes that Patrick expelled were not real terrestrial snakes but symbolic celestial snakes?

In my post “Fulacht fiadh – salt extraction facility?” I talked about the climate change patterns in Ireland over last 5,000 years and how they could have affected people’s ability to extract salt from sea water.

The Greenland Ice Cores provide a temperature record for the last 5,000 years. Clearly manifest are three temperature peaks which correspond with the archaeologically and historically documented Warm Periods in the North Atlantic region: Minoan Warm Period 1450–1300 BC, a Roman Warm Period 250 BC – 0 AD, the Medieval Warm Period 800–1100 AD. On the chart you can also clearly see the well documented extreme cold period known as the little Ice Age 1350 to 1850 AD.

“The Bronze Age Optimum” starts with the sudden sharp rise in temperature during the Minoan Warm Period which started right about 1500 BC. How warm was Atlantic northern Europe during the Minoan Warm Period can be discerned from the fact that during the Minoan warm period, millet was grown in southern Scandinavia. Today Millet is grown in tropical and subtropical regions, it is an important crop in Asia, Africa and in the southern U.S.. The average annual temperature in Mississippi and Alabama where millet is grown today is about 10 degrees, which should be compared with today’s average annual temperature in Denmark, which is 8 degrees.

The temperature after the Minoan Warm Period drops and has another minimum around 1200 BC rising to another maximum around 1000 BC. After that it oscillates around relatively stable low value until it suddenly starts to rise around 250 BC. This is the beginning of the Roman Warm Period

The Roman warm period started quite suddenly around 250 BC. Some studies in a bog in Penido Vello in Spain have shown that in Roman times it was around 2-2.5 degrees warmer than in the present. The Roman warm period is amply documented by numerous analyses of sediments, tree rings, ice cores and pollen – especially from the northern hemisphere. Studies from China, North America, Venezuela, South Africa, Iceland, Greenland and the Sargasso Sea have all demonstrated the Roman Warm Period. Additionally, it has been documented by ancient authors and historical events.

How warm was Northern Europe during the Roman Warm Period can be seen by the fact that during the culmination of the Roman warm period olive trees grew in the Rhine Valley in Germany. Citrus trees and grapes were cultivated in England as far north as near Hadrian’s Wall near Newcastle.

The temperature then has a sudden drop during the first century AD but it then rises as suddenly and stays stable high until the end of the fourth century AD when it suddenly drops during the first half of the fifth century to an extreme low level.

The dates of St Patrick‘s life are uncertain. His own writings provide no evidence for any dating more precise than the 5th century generally. The Irish annals for the fifth century date Patrick’s arrival in Ireland at 432 AD. His sermon on the Mt Croagh Patrick, during which he banished snakes from Ireland must have happened soon afterwords…

St Patrick’s arrival to Ireland coincides with the beginning of the sudden huge drop in average temperature, which during his life fell to the level comparable to the temperature during the so called “Little ice age”.

So Patrick arrives to Ireland. He defeats the old Sun God Crom Dubh, whose holy mountain was the same Mt Croagh Patrick from which Patrick drove snakes into the sea. He converts people to Christianity. And at the same time during the destruction of the old religion based on sun worship, the sun “dies”. The heat of the sun disappears.

In my post “Three suns” I talked about the symbolic link between Snakes and Dragons and the heat of the sun. This link was clearly preserved in Slavic mythology. Snakes come out during the hottest part of the year and thus symbolize the summer. Slavs believed that snakes “suck the heat out of the sun” and that this is why summer sun eventually looses it’s heat and autumn and winter arrive. The dragon is actually the symbol of the summer sun’s extreme heat, destructive heat which brings drought.

Symbolically with the disappearance of the sun’s heat, the snakes and dragons, the symbols of sun’s summer heat, disappeared too.

The belief that snakes and dragons were driven out of Ireland by Patrick, could be remnant of the blame that the Sun worshiping Pre-Christian Irish put on Patrick and his Christianization efforts for the sudden (and probably catastrophic) climate change. Basically they blamed Patrick for driving the summer out of Ireland.

On the other hand, it is actually quite possible that Patrick’s owes his success in converting Ireland to Christianity to this sudden (and probably catastrophic) change of climate. To worshipers of the Sun God Crom Dubh, it must have looked like their god has abandoned them. So they turned to Christ, the “savior”…

This is a very interesting Celtic coin from Panonia. Unfortunately I don’t know anything else about this coin, so would appreciate any additional info, like the location where it was found and dating.

Front: Solar rider.

I already wrote about the symbolism of the solar rider in my posts “The horseman” and “King John“. It is a very common motif on Celtic coins which shows that Celtic religion was in essence a solar cult.

In short, this solar rider represents the sun god. The sun god dominates the white part of the year, the period between Belatane and Samhain, the summer and autumn. You can read more about the Celtic calendar in my post “Two crosses“.

Back: Lion’s head. In the middle of the white period of the year, at the point that marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, we find zodiac sign Leo (lion). The point that marks the end of summer and beginning of autumn, Lughnasadh, falls in the middle of the Leo zodiac sign.

But it gets better.

Why does the lion have fish symbol around his eye?

Have a look at this image:

The point marking end of the Leo (lion) zodiac sign is directly opposite to the point marking the beginning of the Pisces (fish) zodiac sign. The constellation Pisces is invisible during the Pisces period. In the Northern hemisphere Pisces can be seen from August to January, right after the Leo period…

Lion is literally looking at fish…

Such complex zodiac imagery is an interesting thing to find on a Celtic coin don’t you think?

There is a Serbian legend that says that once there were three suns, but dragon ate two. It would have eaten all three, if it wasn’t for a swallow who managed to hide the last, third one, under her wing.

This is why today we only have one sun.

Three suns rising over the snow covered land…

This phenomena is called “sun dogs” or “mock suns”, meteorological name parhelion (plural parhelia). This is an atmospheric phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to the left and/or right of the Sun. They often occur in pairs, one on each side of the Sun, mostly at sunrise or sunset. They can occur at any time during the year but are most prominent and striking during the winter.

I would here want to give the analysis of this legend.

Dragon eating two out of three suns

In Serbian folklore, snake and dragon are linked. Dragons are actually believed to be just very old very big snakes. They are both associated with the fire, the heat of the sun. This is because snakes only appear during the hottest part of the year, summer. If the appearance of the three suns on the horizon is the most common and most striking during the winter, then the appearance of the snakes (dragons) marks the end of the three suns season. From that moment on it is most likely that only one sun will rise every morning, the one that the snake (dragon) didn’t manage to eat.

Swallow saving the last, third, sun

In my post “Leto” i talked about the link between the return of the migratory birds and the beginning of the summer. I proposed that the Slavic word for summer “leto” actually comes from the word “let” meaning “flight”. When I was a kid, it was the arrival of swallows, of all other migratory birds, that was the definite sign that the winter was over. If the appearance of the three suns on the horizon is the most common and most striking during the winter, then the arrival of the swallows marks the end of the three suns season. From that moment on it is most likely that only one sun will rise every morning, the one hidden under the swallow’s wing.

So far so good.

But what about the the statement “once there were three suns”? Was there a time when three suns rising in the east was everyday occurrence? Well the rising of the three suns on the horizon is the most common and most striking during the winter. So there is a good chance then that the during the eternal winter of the last Ice Age, the three suns rising in the east was everyday occurrence.

Then the climate changes. The sun regained it’s heat. The dragon, which is in Serbian folklore symbol of the sun’s fire, sun’s heat, returns, and eats two out of the three suns. The birds, including swallows return to the land which is now green again, saving the last, third sun, from the dragon…

So is it possible that this legend is actually talking about the Last Ice Age, when every morning “three suns rose in the east”? If so it can be dated to the end of the Younger Dryas period, which lasted between 10,800 and 9500 BC. Well, as I already wrote in my posts about Montenegrian tumuluses, we have archaeological proof that the Irish Annals preserved 5000 years old stories about the migration of the R1b beaker people into Ireland. Also as I already wrote in my post “Dreamtime” we have proof that some of the Australian Aboriginal stories are over 40,000 years old. So I believe that it is possible that this Serbian legend could be over 10,000 years old memory of the last Ice Age, the time when there were three suns, before the raging dragon ate two…

Yesterday while I was writing my post about Glavica cemetery, I had this nagging feeling of Déjà vu: calotte shaped isolated hill with many medieval graves dug into its sides. Protected from destruction and looting by a local taboo…

But by the time I have finished my article I still couldn’t put my finger on it. So I published my article, went to have dinner, and then it hit me. Suddenly I knew where I had seen something like that before.

Gruda Boljevića tumulus is one of the most interesting and most important archaeological sites of the Montenegrin Late Copper – Early Bronze age. It is also probably one of the most important archaeological sites found recently in Europe.

The reason why I believe that this tumulus is so important, is because it shows that the dolmen building, golden cross disc making culture which developed in Montenegro in the first half of the third millennium BC, has its direct cultural roots in Yamna culture of the Black Sea steppe. Why is this important? Because the gold cross discs found in this tumulus and other Montenegrian tumuluses are later found in Beaker culture sites in Ireland and Britan. And the Irish annals tell us that the Early Irish who brought with them metallurgy and gold migrated to Ireland from Russian steppe, via Balkans and then Iberia. Gruda Boljevića is the last and most important piece of evidence which confirms that the Irish annals contain not pseudo histories, but real histories which talk about events that happened in the 3rd millennium BC…

But Gruda Boljevića is also interesting in another way.

Tumuluses are well known archaeological features in Montenegro, which is why Gruda Boljevića was also assumed to be a prehistoric grave even before the excavation. The local legend says that two wedding parties met and fought and that the victims of this tragic fight were buried under the Gruda Boljevića tumulus. This type of legends is often linked to ancient burial type archaeological sites in Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro. I already wrote about this type of sites in my post about wedding party graveyards. So it was assumed that Gruda Boljevića was one of such ancient burial sites. This assumption was conﬁrmed during building of a house south of the tumulus, when one of many medieval stone cist graves, which were dug into the original bronze age tumulus was discovered. This is the plan of the Gruda Boljevića tumulus with the locations of the medieval graves in and around the tumulus.

The Medieval graves fall into two types:

Stone boxes with gable roof like tops

Stone boxes with flat tops

The skeletons found in these medieval graves date from the period 12-13th century.

Graves were full of grave goods which show strong cultural links to both coastal regions of Montenegro and the inland regions of Serbia particularly the Morava valley. Here are some examples of the grave goods found:

Gruda Boljevića tumulus had an irregular shape and had a diameter of 24 m.

Now have a look at this satellite picture. It shows the location of the Glavica hill cemetery.

You can see an isolated perfectly circular hill covered in oak forest. The bottom left is the fenced off area with the new cemetery and the chapel.

This is the side view of the hill. You can see that it has flat calotte shape typical of tumulus hills.

So the big question is: is Glavica hill a tumulus, which was, just like Gruda Boljevića, reused as the burial ground during medieval time?

Here is a picture of the graves near the summit of the hill with the holy oak and the altar:

Is it possible that all these graves are dug into the side of the tumulus?

Now if Glavica hill is a tumulus it is truly gigantic. Judging by the Google maps it is about 70 meters in diameter. Compare that with Gruda Boljevića which is only 24 meters in diameter.

And finally, if Glavica hill is a tumulus, what period does it date from? If it is from the Early Bronze Age, like all the other tumuluses I wrote about in my series about Montenegrian tumuluses, then we should expect a central cist grave with additional secondary Bronze and Iron Age burials dotting the hill hidden among the later Medieval ones. If however this tumulus is from the Late Bronze age, or Iron Age, then it could, potentially, hide a spectacular untouched huge burial chamber of someone very very important.

But as I already said in my post about Glavica cemetery, there is no money or will or interest to do any additional excavation on the site.

Maybe this post might spark some new interest. Hopefully by archaeologists and not treasure hunters…

I want to thank my friend Aleksandar Tešić for this picture of the Glavic hill and for the additional pictures of the actual graveyard inside the forest.

Holy oak grove covering Glavica (Head) hill in South Western Serbia hides a mysterious medieval Serbian cemetery. Thousands of huge stone monuments of unusual shapes cover the conical hill. They are all placed in circles around a huge ancient oak tree which grows on the hill’s summit. Next to the oak trunk stands a stone altar table.

People were buried in this necropolis between 12th and 18th century. Monuments are of various shapes and sizes and some are truly enormous. A lot of them are finely carved with religious (Christian or Pagan or Fusion???) images.

The most unusual ones are the huge carved stone blocks in the form of fish, like this one.

Similar fish shaped tombstones were also discovered in medieval Serbian cemetery in Mali Zvečan near Kosovska Mitrovica.

The cemetery is located at the very end of a fertile Deževo valley below the steep slopes of Mount Golija, near the village of Ljuljac. The valley is locally known as the “Valley of the kings” because it once was the location of the court of the Serbian Nemanjić family.

The only reason this cemetery has remained intact and undisturbed by the treasure hunters is the fear of disturbing the holy ground protected by the holy oak forest and the ancient holy oak in its center. The hill is considered a taboo place by the local villagers.

Unfortunately there is no money, or interest, for any further archaeological investigation of the site.

There is one thing that I always wondered about fulachta fiadh: why were so many of them built in waterlogged acidic soil, near peat bogs? According to professor Aidan O’Sullivan “fulachta are often found in waterlogged soils by lakes, streams, fens, etc and often close to the edge of a bog. At Killoran fulachta were overwhelmingly located in glacial till at the edges of the bogs”. However according to many other sources, there are actually quite a few fulactha which were set in bogs. For instance a lot of the c.80 burnt mounds on Clare Island seem to be set on bog.

Every single potential use of fulachta fiadh I have discussed so far would not have been possible if the fulacht fiadh trough was cut into a waterlogged acidic soil. Unless the trough was made absolutely watertight. Which most of them weren’t. Here are two examples. Look at the gaps between the planks in the first one. And the second one is made from roundwood, impossible to make watertight.

Any hole dug in an waterlogged acidic soil would soon fill with acidic water. If the pit was dug in the peat draining area at the edge of the bog, it would soon fill with peat draining water. Whatever the source of the acidic water, the acid in the water would prevent acorns from leaching, would make horrible tasting beer, would make salt extraction through evaporation impossible…

So why were so many fulachta fiadh built in waterlogged acidic soils and on the edges of bogs? To answer that question we need to understand what peat bogs are.

Bogs are rain fed (ombrotrophic). They need poorly-drained areas, a climate where precipitation exceeds evaporation, and a nutrient-poor environment that favors peat mosses in their ecologic competition against higher plants. Growth of higher plants is also curbed by peat mosses themselves because they bind available nutrients and render the bog water acidic. The acidity comes from the so called low-molecular-weight organic acids (LMWOAs): Formic, acetic, pyruvic, oxalic, malonic, and succinic acids. The amount of these acids in bog water is so high that the pH of bog water is 3-4. This is really acidic indeed. If this bog water is then exposed to the sunshine, it will get even more acidic.

“This work describes the effects of simulated solar UV light on the bulk properties of dissolved organic matter (DOM) of bog lake water and on the formation of low-molecular-weight organic acids (LMWOAs). By means of size-exclusion chromatography it was shown that the more hydrophilic moieties of the DOM were preferentially photodegraded while the more hydrophobic ones remained relatively unaffected or were even formed. The combined photochemical-biological degradation proved to be more important than the pure photochemical mineralization. Formic, acetic, pyruvic, oxalic, malonic, and succinic acids were identified as important degradation products. Their contribution to the dissolved organic carbon increased from 0.31% before to 6.4% after 24 h irradiation. About 33% of the bioavailable photoproducts of DOM were comprised of these LMWOAs.“

Translated into plain English, solar radiation will degrade organic matter found in bog water and form more low-molecular-weight organic acids (LMWOAs), making the bog water even more acidic. How much more acidic? Not sure what the final pH of the bog water exposed to the sunshine is. But it is definitely low enough to serve as a very good pickling solution.

Pickling is the process of preserving or expanding the lifespan of food by immersing in pickling brine (salty and acidic liquid). If the food contains sufficient moisture, a pickling brine may be produced simply by adding dry salt which draws water out of the food creating salty liquid. Natural fermentation at room temperature, by lactic acid bacteria, produces the required acidity creating salty and acidic liquid – pickling brine. If the food does not contain sufficient moisture, pickling can also be achieved by immersion of food in some salty acidic liquid, such as mixture of salty water and vinegar. If you want your pickling to be successful, the pH of the pickling brine has to be 4.6 or lower, which is sufficient to kill most bacteria. The pickling procedure will typically affect both food’s texture and flavor but it will preserve otherwise easily perishable food for months or longer. Foods that can be pickled include meats, fruits, eggs, vegetables and milk products like cheese.

Now bog water has a pH of 3-4 before solar irradiation. Well below the required acidity of pickling solutions. For those who don’t know much about pH scale, here is a quick overview. The pH scale measures how acidic or basic a substance is. The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14. A pH of 7 is neutral. A pH less than 7 is acidic and more than 7 is caustic. The scale is not linear but logarithmic. This means that liquid with pH 3 is 10 time more acidic than the liquid with pH 4…

So bog water is 10 time more acidic than what is at minimum required from a pickling solution in order to kill all the harmful bacteria in the food.

Yes but what does pickling has to do with bog water? Who would use bog water for pickling? Well as it turns out a lot of people. And some of them could have been the Bronze Age Irish builders of fulachta fiadh

As I already said in my post “Fulacht fiadh – meat and fish curing facility”, the ancient Irish probably used both salt and smoke curing of meat and fish as a means of preserving it long term. But there is another way Ancient Irish could have preserved food long term without need for salting or smoking.

They could have buried it into the peat bog.

This is bog butter:

“Bog butter” refers to an ancient waxy substance found buried in peat bogs, particularly in Great Britain and in Ireland.

In the article entitled “Mysteries of bog butter uncovered” published in the magazine Nature in 2004, we can read that the research by Richard Evershed and his colleagues from the University of Bristol has proven that what is commonly known as the ‘bog butter‘ is the remains of both dairy products and meat encased in the peat.

“Those who live in the countryside of Ireland and Scotland and dig up chunks of peat for fuel have long been familiar with bog butter. While gathering the compressed plant matter, which can be burned in fires, diggers occasionally slice into a white substance with the appearance and texture of paraffin wax. This is thought to be the remains of food once buried in the bog to preserve it. Waterlogged peat is cool and contains very little oxygen, so it can be used as a primitive kind of fridge. The question is what type of food was buried in the peat. Local lore sometimes says that the waxy stuff is literally the remains of butter. For example, the seventeenth-century English writer Samuel Butler remarked in one of his famous poems that butter in Ireland “was seven years buried in a bog”. But there could be an alternative source for the waxy material: dead animals. In the eighteenth century, French chemists discovered that human corpses often contain adipocere, a substance also known as ‘grave-wax’. So bog butter could be the remains of carcasses rather than dairy products.

To find out, Evershed and his colleagues took a close look at the fatty acids in bog butter. The chains of hydrocarbons in these molecules differ between those derived from dairy and those from meat. They looked at nine samples of bog butter provided by the National Museum of Scotland, some of which are 2000 years old. They reported that six of the bog butter samples come from dairy products, and three are from animal fat (carcasses). So ancient Scots (read here Irish as the term Scot actually means Irish) clearly used the peat to store both types of food.“

In the article “Underwater storage techniques preserved meat for early hunters” by Sally Pobojewski we can read about the experiments performed by Daniel C. Fisher, professor of geological and biological sciences at the University of Michigan and the curator of the Museum of Paleontology, who proved that burying meat in the peat bog will perfectly preserve it for two years.

“From autumn to mid-winter of 1989, Fisher anchored legs of lamb and venison on the bottom of a shallow, open-peat water pond and buried other meat sections in a nearby peat bog. Caches were left in place for up to two years and checked periodically for decomposition. The meat remained essentially fresh for most of the first winter. By spring, progressive discoloration had developed on the outside, but interior tissue looked and smelled reasonably fresh. The combination of cold water temperature and increased acidity in the meat produced by pond bacteria called lactobacilli, which can survive without oxygen, made the meat unpalatable to other bacteria that normally decompose dead tissue, according to Fisher. Laboratory analyses of meat retrieved from the pond and bog in April 1992 showed no significant pathogens and bacterial counts were comparable to levels found in control samples Fisher stored in his home freezer.“

So our hunters from the fianna hunting teams could have used the same technique to preserve the meat for the winter. They would bring the animals they have killed to their camp. They would take whatever they wanted to eat on the day, probably internal organs, head and such bits as they are the most perishable. They would cook this as a stew in a pot (not in fulacht fiadh trough 🙂 ). They would maybe even roast some of the animals on a spit over a cooking pit (cooking procedure described in the Irish histories as “cooking using fulacht fiadh”). They would then cut the animal into manageable bits and would place these bits in deep peat bog pits full of acidic peat water, located at the edge of the camp. Or they would bury the meat pieces in deep peat trenches. The meat could then be taken out of the peat storage when needed and either salted and smoked or cooked or sold.

Professor Fisher suggests that: “Underwater caching turns out to be a simple and effective way to store meat for long periods. Fossils preserved at ancient cache sites suggest it was an important and common part of the winter-to-spring subsistence strategy of Ice Age hunters“.

And we know from the archaeological evidence that this way of preserving meat and fat was as common in Ancient Ireland and Scotland too.

“Scandinavian freshwater fishermen traditionally used peat bogs to preserve their catches until they could pick them up on their way out of the mountains. Fish buried in peat moss or treated with a moss extract stayed fresh weeks longer than untreated fish. And we all know how perishable fish is.

Dr. Terence Painter, professor emeritus at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who researched preservative abilities of peat says that it can be used for long term preservation of highly perishable food stufs. And they have proven that it is not a lack of oxygen or the presence of a chemical called tannin acting as a preservative which is preventing decay.

Painter and his associates, Yngve Boersheim and Bjoern Christensen, isolated a complex sugar in sphagnum moss, which forms peat bogs after hundreds of years. They set out to prove that the sugar, which they have named sphagnum, was the real preservative in a variety of tests in a government-funded study.

In other tests, the researchers treated 3/4-inch-long zebra fish with peat or extract and left others untreated. After two weeks, the treated fish were fine, while the untreated ones had virtually vanished due to decay.

In a demonstration for the Norwegian state radio network NRK, Christensen opened a plastic container in which a zebra fish had been stored on peat for two years. It was intact and smelled fine. This is incredible considering that fish will start smelling in 2 days unless it was frozen straight after it was caught.

Fish isn’t the only food that may be preserved. Painter said his team has had success with apples, carrots, radishes and other vegetables. Norwegians had a tradition of storing their root plants, such as carrots and turnips, in peat bogs to preserve them.

The researchers have received a Norwegian government grant to start a pilot project testing commercial applications. Painter said it is not clear when the first commercial uses could begin.“

“The cooking hypothesis is rendered even less convincing by the near absolute lack of animal bone or plant material within the troughs. Proponents of this hypothesis have argued that the lack of animal material is likely due to preferential decay associated with elevated soil acidity, which is a key feature of burnt mound sites, of which many are located on marshy uplands…”

Now in these marshy areas a pit dug into the ground would quickly fill with water. Acidic marshy water. If the pit is dug at the edge of the peat bog, the water would also contain peat water draining from the bog. If your fulacht is located near the bog but not in the bog drain area, you can dig a hole in the bog, get bog water from it and transfer it using pots. Or you can dig some wet peat, and dissolve it in already acidic marshy water filling your fulacth trough. The resulting peat water is exactly what you need for preserving meat and fish. All you would need to do to preserve your meat or fish would be to dunk it into the pit full of peat water and keep doing this until the pit is almost full.

You could even salt the meat and fish first before you dunk it into the pit, but you don’t have to. Once you fill the pit, you would then put some logs on top of it all to press the pit content down so that it stays submerged. You would then cover the pit with planks or thick branches (roundwood) and then with a thick layer of peat to thermally insulate it and that’s about it. O yes, you would also need to mark the spot where the pit is, so that you don’t accidentally step into it. 🙂

Once the meat and fish was removed from the pit, there would be no trace left of it to be found by archaeologists today. Except if the meat and fish was for whatever reason forgotten and never taken out. In which case, today, 3000 years later, archaeologists would just find a lump of “bog butter”…

This means that the location of many fulachta fiadh in marshy waterlogged areas near bogs suddenly begins to make sense. Was one of the reason why the hunting camps of the fianna were located near peat bogs because peat bogs were natural meat storage facilities, where large amount of meat from fish and animals killed during the summer hunting season could have been stored and preserved until it was needed later in the year? I believe so.

But fulachta fiadh which were built in waterlogged acidic soils near peat bogs were not just used for food preservation. The animals, both terrestrial animals and fish, whose meat was preserved in bog water also had skins and they needed to be preserved to. As I already wrote in my post “Fulacht fiadh – tannery“, the Bronze Age hunters had several ways of preserving the animal skins and turning them into leather or pelts: vegetable tanning, brain tanning, urine tanning and bran (flour) and salt tanning. All these tanning methods are more or less well known. But there is another tanning method that Fianna could have used, which is almost completely forgotten.

Peat tanning.

While I was researching animal skin tanning I came across acid tanning, or pickling. Now acid tanning is not really the best description of this procedure. It should more precisely be called bran (flour), salt and acid tanning. It is basically the same procedure as wet bran (flour) and salt tanning used in Serbia except that additional acid is added to the tanning solution. You can read about the bran (flour) salt tanning in my post “Fulacht fiadh – tannery”. Acid tanning is a very fast way to tan animal skins and uses the same principal used in pickling vegetables. Skin is immersed into strong pickle (salty acidic liquid) which kills all bacteria in the skin and also dissolves all non structural proteins and fats in the skin making the skin thinner and easier to work with.

Here is a short summary of the acid tanning procedure which you can find online on many websites. I will use it to explain how a fulacht fiadh could have been used for this type of tanning.

According to the most acid tanning instructions, the chemicals required for acid pickling are:

27 liters water

1 kilo bran flakes

1 kilo of plain or pickling salt (not iodized)

0.45 liters of battery acid (from auto parts store)

1 kilo of baking soda

This is a very good video showing how to do acid tanning using battery acid. Any strong acid can be used for skin tanning but battery acid seems to be most popular.

If your fulacht fiadh trough has volume of 150 liters, you would need 5,5 kilos of bran, 5,5 kilos of salt, 5,5 kilos of wood ash and 150 liters of acidic bog water.

Procedure:

“Make sure the skins were fleshed, membraned and salted immediately after the animals were skinned. If the skin was dried for temporary storage, soak the dried skins in clear, fresh water until flexible. “

The streams near which most of the fulachta fiadh were built come handy here.

“Boil 12 liters of water and pour over one kilo of bran flakes. Let this sit for an hour, then strain the bran flakes out, saving the brownish water solution.”

Bran doesn’t really need to be taken out of the solution for it to work. You will just have to later get all the bits out of the fur. So here is how you could achieve this part of the procedure in fulacht fiadh. Let the fulacht fiadh trough fill with fresh bog water, or marshy acidic water into which you have added some wet peat to increase acidity. Leave it to sit exposed to the sun for a day, maybe two. Then boil the water using fire heated stones. Once the water was boiled add bran to it and stir it for a while, and then leave it sit for an hour.

“Next, bring the remaining four gallons of water to a boil. Put the 16 cups of salt in a plastic trash can. Pour the water over the salt and use the stirring stick to mix until the salt dissolves. Add the brown bran liquid. Stir.“

Add more hot stones to the trough until it boils again. Then add salt and mix well so that the salt is all dissolved.

“When this solution is lukewarm, you are ready to add the battery acid. Read the warning label and first aid advice on the battery acid container. While wearing gloves and an old, long-sleeved shirt, very carefully pour the battery acid down the inside of the trash can into the solution — don’t let it splash. Stir the battery acid in thoroughly.”

This part can be skipped. We have started with the acidic bog water, which should by now be even more acidic because of the solar radiation and the work of lactic bacteria which is busily decomposing bran and organic matter from the peat and adding lactic acid to the mix.

“Add the skins to the solution and stir, pressing the skins down carefully under the liquid with the stirring stick until the skins are fully saturated.“

Well, get your skins from the stream. They should be nice and plump now. Squeeze the water out of them and then dunk them into the fulacht fiadh trough.

“Leave the skins to soak for 40 minutes, stirring from time to time to make sure all parts of the skins are exposed to the solution.“

I have found recommendations that go from 40 minutes (most common) to 20 days but mostly the duration of pickling is less than an hour. The time it takes to thoroughly pickle the skin will vary depending on the thickness of the skin. You can tell it is completely pickled when the skin is a milky white color all the way through, with no pink color. It is very difficult to say how long it would take to pickle skins in fulacht fiadh trough using bog water as acid solution. But we can try to guess. As I already said, the tanning solution used in the so called “acid tanning”, and which we have created in the fulacht fiadh trough, is basically the same solution used in wet bran (flour) and salt tanning in Serbia, with additional acid added to it. Considering that in Serbian wet bran (flour) and salt tanning procedure the skins are left in tanning solution for 3 days, I would say that the time we need to leave skins in the fulacht fiadh trough for anywhere between one hour and 3 days. We should stir the the skins from time to time to make sure all parts of the skins are exposed to the solution. We should also examine the skins from time to time and check if they were white all the way through.

“Fill your other trash can with clear, lukewarm water. After the soaking is complete. Use the stirring stick to carefully move the skins one by one into the trash can with clear warer. This is the rinsing process, which removes the excess salt from the skins. Stir and slosh the skins for about five minutes, changing the water when it looks dirty.”Take the skins out of the fulacht fiadh trough. Take them to the stream and wash them thoroughly until the water coming out of them is clear.

“At this point, some people add a box of baking soda to the rinse water. Adding baking soda will neutralize some of the acid in the skin – this is good because there will be less possibility of residual acid in the fur to affect sensitive people. However, this also may cause the preserving effects of the acid to be neutralized. You need to make the choice to use baking soda based on your own end use of the skin. If skin or fur will spend a lot of time in contact with human skin, use the baking soda. If the pelt will be used as a rug or wall hanging, you are probably ok not to use baking soda.

If you decide to use baking soda, place the hide in the neutralizing solution, and stir for 20 minutes. Remove the hide from the neutralizing solution, rinse, and drain.”If you want to wear the skins you are treating or use them as bed covers, you should probably neutralize the acid in them. This is how to do it. You can’t use fulacht fiadh trough for this, as it will fill with acidic bog water as soon as you empty it. You will have to use either large pots, like large funerary pots, or you will have to take the skins to another fulacht fiadh which is built in a dry well drained soil and use the trough there, Whatever you decide to do, you will need to use something in place of baking soda, as it was not readily available in Bronze Age Ireland. Baking soda is Alkali. In chemistry, an alkali is a basic, ionic salt of an alkali metal or alkaline earth metal chemical element. An alkali also can be defined as a base that dissolves in water. A solution of a soluble base has a pH greater than 7.0. Now when you mix acid (pH < 1) and alkali (pH > 7) you get salts and neutral pH. So where do we find an alkali that can be used instead of baking soda, and that we can use to neutralize acid in the skins we have just pickled?

The word “alkali” is derived from Arabic “al qalīy” (or alkali), meaning the wood ashes, referring to the original source of alkaline substances. A water-extract of burned plant ashes, called potash and composed mostly of potassium carbonate, is mildly basic. After heating this substance with calcium hydroxide (slaked lime), a far more strongly basic substance known as caustic potash (potassium hydroxide) can be produced. But for de-acidifying our skins, we need ordinary weak base – potash. So grab few handfuls of wood ash from your fireplace and chuck it into the pot or fulacht fiadh trough full of clear water. How much will depend on volume of your vessel. For a 150 liters trough you will need 1 kilo of ash. The major components of wood ashes are potassium carbonate (potash) and sodium carbonate (soda ash), and their average pH is about 9,5 while the pH of baking soda is 9. Mix the solution. Submerge your skins in and leave them soaking for not more than 20 minutes. If you leave your skins in the potash solution for too long, the hair will start slipping (falling off), which is exactly what potash is used for in bucking, as I already described in my post “Fulacht fiadh – tannery”.

“Remove the hide from the rinse and hang over a beam to drain. Rub it with some oil, like neatsfoot oil, salmon oil, beechnut oil, to condition the skin.“

Hmmm. I am not sure what kind of oils Bronze Age Irish had access to. Probably salmon oil and beechnut oil. So, get the skins out of the potash soulution, squeeze them and then leave them over a branch to drain. Get some oil and rub it into the skins.

“Stretch the hides on a stretcher or hide dryer to finish the process. Place it in a place out of the sun to dry. After a few days the hide should feel dry and flexible. Take it down from the rack and go over the skin side with a wire brush until it has a suede-like appearance. Let the hide finish drying until it is fully dry, which should take a few more days.“

This is exactly the same drying procedure used in Serbian wet bran (flour) and salt tanning procedure. Get the skins onto a rack and place them in a shade to dry. Keep an eye on them so that they don’t get chewed on by wolves and such things….Take them off when they are dry and that’s it…

Now here is the problem with using bog water for this type of tanning.

The recommendation that I found online is that no matter what acid you use, after mixing the pickle up, the pH level should read below a 2.0. Usually it reads 1.1. You should not let the pH go above 2.5 during pickling, and definitely not above 3.0, because then bacteria will continue to grow. Is our day old bran fortified peat water acidic enough? I have no idea. But as I already said, the tanning solution used in the so called “acid tanning”, and which we have created in the fulacht fiadh trough, is basically the same solution used in wet bran (flour) and salt tanning in Serbia, with additional acid added to it. So if bran (wheat) and salt solution is enough to pickle the skins, I would guess that adding highly acidic bog water, which is more acidic than normal vegetable pickle solutions, should make the process even more effective. We know that the pH of the bog water is between 3-4 and that it increases when exposed to sunlight. Is it possible that the final solution has pH below 2,5? Possibly. Whatever the final pH of bog water is, we know that bog water can be used for skin and hair pickling and turning of row skins into pelts and leather.

The proof are bog bodies.

A bog body is a human cadaver that has been naturally mummified in a peat bog. Unlike most ancient human remains, bog bodies have retained their skin and internal organs due to the unusual conditions of the surrounding area. These conditions include highly acidic water, low temperature, and a lack of oxygen, and combine to preserve but severely tan their skin. While the skin is well-preserved, the bones are generally not, due to the acid in the peat having dissolved the calcium phosphate of bone.

The oldest fleshed bog body is that of the so called “Cashel Man“, who dates to 2000 BCE during the Bronze Age.

The best preserved fleshed bog body is that of the so called “Tollund Man“. Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC.

Now some people will say: “Well these are preserved because they have been kept inside the bogs in anaerobic acidic conditions for thousands of years…The conversion of skin to leather took a long time….This was not a practical procedure which could be used for tanning animal skins…”

Well I am not surprised that you might say that. I had the same doubts myself. But then I came across this.

Tanbark is the bark of certain species of trees (such as oak) which has high tannin content. It is traditionally used for tanning hides into leather. In some areas of the United States, such as northern California, tanbark is often called “mulch,” even by manufacturers and distributors. In these areas, the word “mulch” may refer to peat moss or to very fine tanbark.

Why?

In “A Dictionary of Science” edited by William Thomas Brande and published 1842 we can read that “attempts have been made to separate astringent matter from peat and to use it in tanning leather”.

So it seems that people in the 19th century believed that peat water could be used for tanning leather. Why did they think that? Well because peasants living near bogs have been using bog water for tanning leather for millennia.

“Tanning in the Strathearn area had been carried out for many years and was known as “peat moss tanning” . The hides were immersed in a peat hole and left to allow the tannin from the peat to seep into them thus producing a primitive sort of leather. This method began to die out towards the end of the 18th century. The hides would get as tough as a wooden board. Later the shoe maker would come and heat the leather over a fire while rubbing grease into it till it was flexible and make brogues for the family.“

This is very interesting don’t you think. Well a certain Ernest Edward Munro Payne certainly though so. There a US Patent US1040400 A granted on Oct 8, 1912 to Ernest Edward Munro Payne which describes use of peat water in leather tanning.

“Be it known that I, ERNEST EDWARD Monro PAYNE, a subject of the King of England, and residing at Aylesbury, in the county of Buckingham, England, have invented certain new and useful improvements in the production of leather, of which the following is a specification. The characteristic feature of this invention is the use, in the production of leather, of a solution of humus (peat) which consists of humic acid, ulmic acid. According to this invention, in producing leather from skin, the skin is prepared as for tannin and is thereafter treated with a solution of humus in alkali (wood ash) and with an acid.“

Water flowing out of bogs has a characteristic brown color from dissolved peat tannins. However the active tanning ingredient in peat is not tannic acid which indeed is found in most plants, but ulmic, humic and crenic acids. However these acids have the same effect on the skin as tannic acid.

On top of this, because peat consists of bits of the plant called sphagnum moss, commonly known as peat moss, it has some additional characteristics which even more increase its tanning ability.

“Three types of humic acids of different sources have been analysed in order to quantify the functional groups that may be liable to react with the proteins of leather. The quantification serves to determine the extent to which each of these acids can be used as tanning or retanning agents. Humic acids have structures similar to those of vegetable tannins.“

Translated into English this means that humic acid found in bog water could have the same or very similar effect on skin turning it into leather, just like tannic acid found in plants.

But some other scientists have confirmed that skin submerged into bog water “becomes bio-resistant” basically turns into leather…

We have evidence that until recently people actually used bogs deliberately to preserve food and skin. Even patents were proposed for commercial, industrial use of this technology.

This sheds a new light on the bog bodies and bog butter…

What I am trying to say is that people could have deliberately placed food and bodies into bogs to preserve them… To make a miracle preservation pit, you don’t need a fulacht trough. All you need is a pit, a hole in the bog, which will fill with bog water. And if you want to use fulacht which is not located in the bog proper, but in the waterlogged marshy area near the peat bog, just dig some wet peat, dunk it into the trough which is already filled with acidic water and mix….

Is this why some fulachta fiadh were originally built in waterlogged acidic soils near bogs? I believe so…

English word “history” means “the aggregate of past events”. What does this “aggregate of past events” actually mean? It basically means a story about what happened….

This is famous gusle player and epic poems singer Rajko Ivković. Born in 1880, in the village Gradovi on mountain Rudnik in Serbia. Survived 3 wars. Had many stories to tell.

According to the official etymology the word “history” comes from Middle English, from Old French “estoire, estorie” ‎which means “chronicle, history, story”, from Latin “historia” which means “account, story”, from Ancient Greek “ἱστορία” ‎(historía) which means “learning through research, narration of what is learned”, from “ἱστορέω” ‎(historéō) which means “to learn through research, to inquire”, from “ἵστωρ” ‎(hístōr) which means “the one who knows, the expert”. Proposed PIE root is “*widstōr” ‎which is supposed to mean “knower, wise man”, from Proto-Indo-European “*weyd-” meaning “‎to see”.

Now how does one become an expert? By doing something for a long time and building the knowledge through experience.

A wise man is man with long experience. An old man usually. A man with life long experience. Who has seen a lot in his life and has learned a lot from what he has seen. He had to. He survived to tell tale…

In Slavic languages we have another word “star”. According to the official etymology this word comes from Proto Slavic “*starъ” (star) which means old. Now proposed further root is Proto-Balto-Slavic “*staʔros” meaning old, from PIE “*steh₂-ro-” from “*stati” meaning to remain, to stay, to survive…Which is what old (star) people are good at doing. They are good at surviving. This is how they got to be old.

So you find a wise old man (vid star) and listen to his stories. And hopefully you will learn something from them which will help you to one day become a wise old man who will have a lot of stories to tell.

Now how do you know who is a wise old man? Basically in the past, any old man was a wise old man.

In Slavic languages we have a word “je” which means “is”. According to the official etymology this word is a shortened from “jȅst” meaning “to be”. The official etymology then goes to say that this Slavic root comes from Proto-Slavic “*estь” which means “to be”, from PIE “*h₁es-” which means “to be”.

Now in South Slavic languages the word “je” means “is” but also “it is”. As “it is” the word “je” is short of “jes” (pronounced yes) meaning “it is”. So the word “jest” comes from “je(s)” + “to” = “(it) is” + “that” and means “to be”. You can see that the root is the word “je(s)” meaning “is”, “it is”.

Anyway…

If you are looking for an old man, you would look for someone who “is old”, which in Slavic languages would be “je star”…

Now let’s look again at the Ancient Greek root of the word “history”: “ἵστωρ” ‎(hístōr) which means “the one who knows, the expert”. Looks suspiciously like “jestar” = “je star” = “is old” = “wise”.

Now let’s look again at the Ancient Greek word derived from this ancient “root”: “ἱστορέω” ‎(historéō) which means “to learn through research, to inquire”. After a lot of research, inquiring, you eventually, if you have learned anything, get old. In Slavic languages “got old” is “je ostario”…

If the old man was unlucky enough to live during the “heroic” times of war, but was lucky enough to survive the war and come home as a victor, he would have had a lot of interesting “heroic” stories to tell. These stories about heroic deeds, which returning heroes would tell to their compatriots were eventually turned into heroic poems or stories by bards, who then passed them on from generation to generation. Until eventually one day someone wrote down these heroic poems or stories and they became histories, the stories of old told by those who survived long enough to become old, to become “ἵστωρ” “jestar”, the wise old man…

“On the First day of Christmas my true love sent to mea Partridge in a Pear Tree.On the Second day of Christmas my true love sent to meTwo Turtle Dovesand a Partridge in a Pear Tree.On the Third day of Christmas my true love sent to meThree French Hens,Two Turtle Dovesand a Partridge in a Pear Tree.…”This is the beginning of the well known English Christmas carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas“.

It enumerates in the manner of a cumulative song a series of increasingly grand gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas, starting with a partridge which was given on the first day. The song, published in England in 1780 without music as a chant or rhyme, is thought to be French in origin, but really no one knows where the song comes from.

There are those who believe that the song has a hidden Christian meaning.

According to Ann Ball in her book, HANDBOOK OF CATHOLIC SACRAMENTALS:

“The “True Love” is Jesus Christ, because truly Love was born on Christmas Day. The partridge in the pear tree also represents Him because that bird is willing to sacrifice its life if necessary to protect its young by feigning injury to draw away predators.The two turtle doves were the Old and New TestamentsThe three French hens stood for faith, hope, and love.The four calling birds were the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.The five golden rings rerepresented the first five books of the Old Testament, which describe man’s fall into sin and the great love of God in sending a Savior.The six geese a-laying stood for the six days of creation.Seven swans a-swimming represented the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit—–Prophesy, Serving, Teaching, Exhortation, Contribution, Leadership, and Mercy.The eight maids a-milking were the eight beatitudes.Nine ladies dancing were the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit—–Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience [Forbearance], Goodness [Kindness], Mildness, Fidelity, Modesty, Continency [Chastity].The ten lords a-leaping were the Ten Commandments.The eleven pipers piping stood for the eleven faithful Apostles.The twelve drummers drumming symbolized the twelve points of belief in The Apostles’ Creed.”Neat…

But, there is another possible origin and meaning of this song. The song could originate in an ancient Pre-Christian system of beliefs and could be linked to fertility rituals related to both female and earth fertility.

And the key for understanding this other possible (and I believe true) meaning of this song lies in the first verse:

“On the First day of Christmas my true love sent to me a Partridge in a Pear Tree”Here it goes:

The grey partridge is a native, non migratory bird of Eurasian shrub lands, grass lands and cultivated areas. The adult is a plump bird. The upper parts are chestnut-brown and grey, but the color is very variable. The hind neck is grey-brown. The wings are mottled brown and darker brown.

Gray partridges begin the slow process of courtship in late winter, as soon as the snow starts to melt. Both sexes perform numerous dramatic displays, including circling, neck-stretching and running with head lowered. In March, the males in a covey begin crowing with their “rusty gate” call, to advertise their presence, especially in the morning and evening. Crowing then leads to ritualized fighting between the males, which fly and peck at each other. Eventually, one male leaves the area, and the victorious bird remains to try and attract a female. The actual mating happens in late April. The female then builds the nest while the male stands guard nearby. The nest is usually located in grasses in open country or along roadsides, fences, hedgerows, ditches and banks. Shortly after the nest is complete, at the beginning of May, the female starts laying eggs. She continues laying one egg per day until her clutch of 9-20 olive-colored eggs is complete. This is one of the largest known clutches produced by any bird.

The partridge mating habits didn’t stay unnoticed by our ancestors. At least in the Balkans. The word for partridge in South Slavic languages is “jarebica” pronounced yarebitsa. The word has no known etymology. I would like to propose one:

In South Slavic languages nouns have genders. The word “jarebica” is a feminine noun meaning that Slavs attributed feminine characteristics to partridge. So the meaning of the word “jarebica” is actually “young, hot (female) you fuck”.

I think that this is quite a fitting name for a bird whose loud passionate mating covers the whole of spring.

There is someone else who goes through the same passionate courtship ritual at the same time as partridge. Young earth Vesna. She is born on the 4th of February, the first day of spring. She gets more and more beautiful as the spring progresses. During this time she is courted by the young sun Jarilo, her twin brother. Their courtship during the spring is nothing else but “jarjeb” meaning “youthful fucking”, the “union” of the young sky (the father) and young earth (the mother). It is this union that produces all life and all the bounty of summer and autumn.

Jarilo, the young sun, marries Vesna the young earth on 6th of May, the day of Jarilo. The day of Jarilo, the 6th of May, is the day which in old Celtic and Serbian calendar marked the beginning of Summer. This is old Beltane, the festival of fire. The fire of the sun. And this is exactly the time when partridge starts laying its eggs. Eggs which are the result of its mating season, of “jarjeb”. Eggs which are symbol of rebirth. The “rebirth” of nature after winter “death”. The rebirth which is the result of the “jarjeb” between Vesna and Jarilo.

Slavic god Jarilo is the young sun, the youthful face of Djed (Grandfather), Triglav (Three headed) Sky God. His name means the young one, the fiery one, the blazing one, the raging one. In his positive aspect, Jarilo was the symbol of youthful male sexual energy, male reproductive fire. In his negative aspect, Jarilo was the symbol of youthful male rage and senseless male destructive fire. This is why he was the Slavic god of spring, vegetation, fertility and war.

Christianity replaced Jarilo with St George, and the day of Jarilo is still today celebrated as the St Georges day (Djurdjevdan or Jurjevo in the Balkans).

South Slavic goddess Vesna is the young earth, the youthful face of Baba (Grandmother), Troglava (Three headed) Earth Goddess. Her name literally means Spring. She is the goddess of youth and female fertility and only has a positive aspect.

I believe that Partridge was in the Balkans associated with Jarilo’s bride, Vesna and was possibly even her holy bird. Here is why I believe that this is the case.

This wedding song recorded in Poljci in Croatia describes the wedding feast. Here is just the beginning:

“I brought my bride home and gave her dinnerFirst evening she ate partridgeSecond evening she ate two pigeons and a quailThird evening she ate three doves, two pigeons and a quailFouth evening she ate four ducks, three doves, two pigeons and a quailFifth evening she ate five gees, four ducks, three doves, two pigeons and a quailSixth evening she ate six sheep, five gees, four ducks, three doves, two pigeons and a quail…”

This is obviously a ritual song performed during a ritual feast. The marriage was supposed to result in many children as the wealth of the family was judged by the number of children and number of cattle they possessed. So this song ritually associates the fertility of Mother Earth with the fertility of the new bride. The fact that the bride eats partridge, the most fertile bird, first, is the sign that this song is part of a fertility ritual. Basically through this act, the fertility of partridge is supposed to be passed onto the bride. The fact that the bride then continues to eat all the children produced by the young Mother Earth shows the desire to pass the fertility of the young Mother Earth to the bride too. This is not surprising because woman’s fertility and the Mother Earth’s fertility is very strongly linked in Balkan Slavic belief system.

Another thing that shows that partridge was regarded as a symbol of fertility by the Balkan Slavs is the Croatian ceremonial wedding game called “traženje jarebice” (looking for partridge) which was first recorded in 17th century. The ritual was performed like this:

When groom’s retinue arrived at the bride’s house to take her away, bride’s father would ask them who they were and what they came for. The leader of the groom’s party would answer that they were looking for a partridge. The bride’s father would then say that he hasn’t seen any partridge. The groom’s party would then insist on checking for themselves that the bride’s father was telling the truth. The bride’s father then let’s the groom’s party in. He then brings out the oldest woman in the house who is holding a sieve on her head and asks the groom’s party if that is the partridge they were looking for? When the groom’s party say that it wasn’t the bride is brought out and the groom’s party exclaim that it is her they were looking for…The groom’s party then takes the bride to the church to get married.

You can see that this ritual is directly linked to fertility. The groom is looking for a fertile young wife, and this is what partridge represents. The fact that the old woman which was brought out firs hold a sieve on her head shows that she is Baba, the Mother Earth, the mother of grain…Again we see linking of woman’s fertility and the Mother Earth’s fertility.

The same custom is found in other parts of Croatia and Bosnia except that partridge is replaced with dove or a lamb, but the ritual is the same…

Finally in “Годишњи обичаји у Пироту и околини” (Anual customs and rituals in Pirot and surrounding area), by Sofija Kostic, we find a Serbian ritual song which describes the ritual feast held during the celebration of St Mitar (Martin) (Mitrovdan), and which used to last for 7 days:

Seventh evening we ate seven bulls, six rams, four gees, two pigeons, one partridge, cheese and bred. O mountain you evil mother!

“

Again the first thing eaten on the first day of the feast is roasted Partridge. Mitrovdan was the day, which in the old Celtic and Serbian calendar marked the end of Summer and the beginning of winter. This is old Samhain. You can read more about this old calendar in my post “Two crosses“. If the mating season of partridge marks the beginning of hot part of the year, summer and autumn, the bountiful part of the year, it is symbolically fitting that the end of this period is marked by the death of partridge. He is roasted (death by fire and death of fire of the sun) and ritually eaten to represent the end of the harvest.

What is also interesting is that the song then proceeds to cumulatively add the same birds and animals listed in the Croatian wedding song. This shows that both ritual songs come from the same belief system and are directly linked to fertility of the Mother Earth…

I believe that these customs show that Partridge was once regarded by South Slavs as the symbol of fertility.

This bird, native in southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe, including Balkans, is in South Slavic languages known as “kamenjarka” (stone, rock bird). Kamenjarka, which is also a feminine noun, is also a archaic slang word for a whore, “young, hot (female) you fuck”…

I have seen somewhere long time ago that in Celtic parts of Iberia, loose women are called partridge, but unfortunately I can’t remember where I saw this. If anyone has any info about this please let me know. Also if you know of any other folk belief system where partridge has the meaning linked to female promiscuity and fertility and with fertility of Mother Earth please let me know so that I can update my article.

So there you have it. The true love the song originally talked about was far from spiritual love. It was physical, fruitful love, the love that produces offspring. And the symbol of that fruitful love was partridge.

Also in Celtic and Serbian calendar, Samhain feast (held in the past by Baltic Serbs at the beginning of November) was the thanksgiving feast which people celebrated to thank their god for providing for them during the previous vegetative season. Listing all the animals people want to multiply, starting with partridge, the symbol of fertility, could be a kind of a magic spell, a way to symbolically ensure accumulation of riches…

But how old could this link between partridge and female fertility be? I believe very very old. I will talk about this in my next post.

In my last post “Fulacht fiadh – meat and fish curing facility” i said that fulachta fiadh were also called Fulachta Fian and were believed to be the cooking place of the Fianna, small, semi-independent warrior bands in Irish mythology. I also said that Geoffrey Keating, in his 17th-century History of Ireland, says that during the winter the fianna were quartered and fed by the nobility, during which time they would keep order on their behalf, but during the summer, from Beltaine to Samhain, they were obliged to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell.

As I said in my last post, this was very interesting. If Fianna were “obliged” to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell, they were basically full time, professional meat and fur hunters. Professional seasonal hunters have two problems that they have to solve if they want to profit from their hunt: How to preserve and store meat and skins.

In my last post I talked about how the ancient Irish could have solved the problem of preserving and storing large quantities of fish and meat.

In this post I would like to talk about how they could have solved the other problem: how to preserve and store large amount of animal skins and furs they would have accumulated during their seasonal hunt.

The process of preserving animal skins aims to make animal skins resistant to bacterial decomposition and weather. This process is quite complicated and consists of many steps which have to be performed correctly and in strict order or the skins will be spoiled.

I will here list these steps, based on an instruction for deer skin preservation process from the Wilderness Institute web page. And I will explain how fulachta fiadh could have been used in this process.

Skinning

Hang the deer upside down to a branch. Cut the belly open and gut and clean the animal. Cut the around the hocks and then along the legs from the hocks to the beely cut. Put the knife away and removing the hide with a fist, not a knife. This is to prevent any knife or score marks on the hide. Score marks now will become holes later. This is a very good video showing how to skin a deer using this technique.

Salting is what sets the hair and keeps the hide from decaying. The moisture content of hides and skins is greatly reduced, and osmotic pressure increased, to the point that bacteria are unable to grow. There are two ways of salting the skins: wet salting and brining.

But theoretically, all hides are brine cured. Crystalline sodium chloride, or common salt, cannot be absorbed by the hide. Only after the salt crystals have been dissolved in water to make a brine can the curing proceed. In the case of the conventional method (pack curing), the salt crystals draw moisture from the hide which dissolves the salt creating brine.

In wet salting, the skins are heavily salted using fine salt by rubbing the salt into the inner side of the skin or hide. After salting, hides are rolled up and placed on an incline to allow fluids to drain away from the hide. After approximately 12 hours the skins are unrolled and all of the wet salt is shaken off. A new layer of fresh salt is applied to the skin as explained above. Skin is rolled again and left to rest for additional 12 hours. If after these 12 hours, the skin still appears excessively wet, the salting process is repeat again. If however the skin appears to be drying, with no more fluid draining from it, it can be hung up across a rack to finish drying for another 24 hours.

In the brine curing process, the hides are in contact with saturated brine at all times. This serves to reduce the time required to cure hides to about 16 hours. The hides have to be constantly turned and agitated to ensure that every part of the skin is properly soaked with brine.

Both of these salting methods would involve use of fulacht fiadh.

If wet salting was used, salt was probably grabbed from leather sacks or pots where it was kept and then applied to the skins by rubbing. The excess salt which was brushed off the skins at the end of each salting stage, could then have been collected and eventually purified and reclaimed through boiling in the trough using fire heated stones.

If brining was used, brine was made in the trough. Different size skins require different size troughs to insure the skin was completely submerged and not tightly folded. This could account for great variety in fulacht fiadh trough size. At the end of the brining process the remaining salt could have been reclaimed from brine through boiling in the trough using fire heated stones.

This of course could only have been possible providing trough was made watertight. If not the brinning solution would either be diluted or chemically changed by influx of water from the soil, if the fulacht fiadh was located on marshy, waterlogged terrain, or the brine would disappear into the ground if the fulacht fiadh was located on dry well drained soil.

At the end of the salting procedure, if the above steps were followed and completed carefully, the skin should be in a stable state. A stable state is when the skin can be safely left as it is for a period of time, even months, without fear of hair slippage or spoilage. This means that the process of preserving the skins can be interrupted at this point and continued at some later more suitable moment, like during the winter, after the end of the hunting season.

It is quite possible that this was the end of the animal skin treatment process which was performed in summer camps. The skins would be salted and stored safely in a tent or in a wood lined pit dug in the well drained ground. They would then be carried to the village where the rest of the skin preservation process which turns skins into leather and pelts was carried away.

There is one thing I have to add about salting. Salting is not a mandatory part of the animal skin preservation process. Salting is used in cases where there is a long enough period between the skinning and the rest of the skin processing. Bacteria in the skin will start decomposition pretty much straight away and even if only couple of hours have passes between skinning and the next processing stage you will be better off using salting to make sure the decomposition was stopped. But if you are going to flesh and wash the skin straight away after skinning, then salting is not necessary. You can basically just wash, stretch and dry the fleshed animal skins completely. You can then store these dry skins in a dry airy place for months until you decide to continue the skin preservation process. This is very important. As I already explained in my post “Fulacht fiadh – salt pan”, salt was a rare and valuable commodity in ancient Ireland and I doubt the Fianna hunters would use salt for treating animal skins unless it was absolutely necessary.

Now next stage in animal skin preservation depends on whether you want to produce leather (hareless skin) or pelts (hairy, furry skin). If you want to produce leather, then the next thing you need to do is bucking followed by rinsing, graining and membraning and then rinsing again.

Bucking

“Bucking” is the soaking process in the solution of lime or lye (wood ashes) the hide is soaked in to remove the mucus in the collagen layer of the hide, as well as to loosen the hairs. It’s the mucus that prevents the tanning medium from adhering to the fibers in the hide. You have to make sure that the bucking solution is not “too strong” which is possible with hardwood ashes, especially with ashes from woods such as oak and maple (the hard, dense woods). A good way to test how strong an ash solution is: float an egg, it should have a thumb nail sized portion floating above the solution (it has to actually float, not sit on top of the settled ashes); barely floating means a weak solution, tipping over means a strong solution.

So mix wood ash into the water, float an egg to determine proper concentration of hard wood ash, then soak hide until hair slips. The skin should soak until the hair pulls free easily. If the water is about 20 degrees Celsius it should slip in about 3 days.

This is another part of the animal skin preservation process which could have been done in fulacht fiadh. A trough would be filled with water. For this to be manageable fulacht fiadh would need to be located next to a water source, as they all are. Ash from camp fires would then be added to the water and mixed in to form bucking solution. When bucking was finished, remaining bucking solution could be scooped out of the trough using cups or pots and spilled on top of the burned mound. Or the water could have been evaporated from the trough using fire heated stones, and the ash then scooped out.

Again, this could only have been possible providing trough was made watertight. If not the bucking solution would either be diluted or chemically changed by influx of water from the soil, if the fulacht fiadh was located on marshy, waterlogged terrain, or the bucking solution would disappear into the ground if the fulacht fiadh was located on dry well drained soil.

Graining

Graining means removing the hair and grain, the part of the skin that holds the hair. Any grain will make the hide stiffer and will prevent the smoke from entering the hide when smoking the hide latter on. This means you are scraping the outer side of the skin. Traditionaly a bone scraper made from a deer ulna bone was used. It works great but must be sharpened through out the process.

Drying Skins

After the hides have been grained set them in the sun to dry. This should not take any more then an hour on a dry day. This drying will make the membraning much easier and productive.

Re-hydrating

Dunk skins into a river or a stream to get them thoroughly wet. Another reason why fulactha fiadh would need to be built next to rivers or streams. This should not take more then about 15 min.

Removing the membrane

By the way bucking also works on the inner side of the skin softening any remains of meat, membrane and other tissue left after skinning. So during graining you can revisit the inner side as well and remove what ever was left clinging to it.

Using the fleshing tool remove the membrane which is what holds the blood vessels. Like the grain, if any membrane is left the hide will be hard and will prevent the smoke from penetrating the hide. You are now working the inner side of the skin. This part of the processing is done as part of fleshing if you want to produce pelts and not leather.

Rinsing

After the membrane has been removed, put the skins in a gunny sack tied off in a river or a stream and leave them overnight. Again it is handy if your camp is next to the river or a stream…

Wringing

Next morning the skins should be thin. Wrap the hide so it forms a donut with the outside of the skin out. Wring in one direction then the other, then rotate the hide and do it again. Do not let the dry out you want the skins thirsty but not dry.

Opening (stretching) the skin

Opening the skin will make the skin be thirsty and will do a better job of taking up the tanning agent.

At the end of this part of the process we have so called “stable” skins, skins which can be stored indefinitely and even used inside where they are not exposed to the elements. They can be smoked to be made more durable and resistant to bacteria and insects. But if you want your skins to be resistant to water and not go cardboard hard ever time they get wet, they need to be tanned, oiled and softened and smoked.

Tanning

Here you can choose which tanning solution to use to tan your skins. Four traditional and tanning processes that have been used for thousands of years in Europe are vegetable (wood) tanning, brain (oil) tanning, urine tanning and bran (flour) and salt tanning.

Bark tanning

Tannins are chemicals, more precise acids, which occur naturally in most plants in various amounts. They transform proteins into insoluble products that are resistant to decomposition and this is why tannins are used as tanning agents for leather.

Tannins occur in nearly every plant. It is found in almost any part of the plant, from root to leaves, bark to unripe fruit to nuts and acorns, but it is most concentrated in the bark layer where it forms a barrier against microorganisms such as fungi and bacteria. Typical materials used for bark tanning include any of the oaks, fir, certain willows, chestnut…

If you want to use bark for tanning extract it is best to collect it in the spring. This is when the bark has the highest concentration of tannins and is the easiest to peel, but you can use bark from any time of year. Supposedly, an older tree has more tannin than a younger one, and the lower parts of the tree contain a higher concentration than the top parts.

Now getting the bark off trees, even if you don’t cut the tree down, will kill the tree. It is good then to know that you can extract tannins not just from bark but also from acorns, oak galls and even leaves (as you can see in this video).

How do you extract tannins out of the bark? You leach them out. You dry the bark, crush it, pound it into a pulp and then cook it. Tannin is water soluble. The warmer the water you soak the bark in the faster the tannin is extracted. But hot water darkens tannin resulting in a darker colored leather. Now remember my post “Fulacht fiadh – acorn leaching pit“? What i described in that post was a way fulacht fiadh could be used to leach tannins out of acorns. Basically you would fill the fulacht fiadh trough with water, heat the water using the fire heated stones, then dump a lot of shelled and crushed acorns into the trough, and keep simmering them, occasionally changing water until all the tannins were leached out and the water is finally clear. Here you can see what tanned water produced by leaching acorns looks like.

The same leaching procedure can be used for extracting tannins from barks. The tanned water which results from this procedure can be scooped out of the fulacht fiadh trough and collected in large clay vessels. It can then be boiled and concentrated. The concentrated tannin rich “tea” can then be poured back into the trough and used as tanning solution for animal skins.

Soaking of the skins in tanning solution should be done first in a relatively weak solution and then in progressively stronger solutions. It is very important to use a very weak solution for your first bath. If the hide is put into a strong tannin bath, the outside gets tanned and shrinks. This inhibits the tannins from penetrating to the center of the hide, leaving the inner parts raw. This is called “dead tanning” or “case hardening”. The ideal bath to start with is one that has already been used for another hide. That way all the large tannin particles have already been used up. This is known as a “spent liquor”. There is another advantage to spent liquors. In an old bark liquor, the bark sugars have fermented, forming lactic and acetic acid, which help remove any traces of lime as well as help preserve the hide.

The skins should then be left in the strong solution for as long as it takes for the solution to penetrate all the way to the center of the skin. But how long that is depends on the thickness of the skin and can go from few weeks to few months. Here you can see skins submerged in the tanning pit and the pile of oak bark next to the pit, used to make tanning liquid. Fulacht fiadh trough uses for skin tanning would look very similar to this.

During the soaking period, fulacht fiadh trough containing skins submerged in tanning solution can be covered with planks or split branches and then covered with hide and soil or peat. From time to time it can be checked on and more tanning concentrate or raw bark can be added to strengthen the tanning solution.

Eventually the skin is taken out of the tanning solution. It then needs to be rinsed in running water (river, stream next to which fulachta fiadh were usually built) and squeezed and rinsed and squeezed…Until it is rinsed I suppose. 🙂

The skin then needs to be oiled. Oiling the bark tanned skin makes it dry softer, darkens it and prevents it from cracking. Vegetable oils (beach nut oil), tallow, brains, bear and boar fat and fish oil have all been used to finish bark tanned leather. The hide that is being oiled should be damp. It should then be stretched in all directions. Oil should then be spread evenly on the skin and the if you want soft leather the skin should be worked soft as it dries. When the hide is dry, it can be lightly dampened and then oiled and worked again. This process of oiling, working and drying can be repeated until you get the softness you desire.

This is truly ancient tanning method. It is quick and well suited for single skin processing in the wild. And as opposed to bark tanning it is environmentally friendly.

There are two distinct methods of brain tanning, one in which you apply tanning solution onto the skin and the other in which you soak the skin in the tanning solution.

Making the brain solution

Every animal has enough brains to brain tan its own hide. Except for buffalo for which you need brain and bone marrow. To prepare brain tanning solution use warm water but not too hot. A good rule of thumb is that if its too hot for you, its too hot for the animal. Too hot will ruin the hide. You have to mix the brains from the animal into warm water and mash them up into a paste.

Applying the brains

The biggest trick to good brain penetration is proper hide moisture content. You want the hide damp in that you can not squeeze and moisture from it, but feels like a sponge. Too dry and the pores will be too tight to let the brains through, too damp and the pores and fibers will be too full to let anything else in.

Rub the brain mixture into the stretched hide until it is thoroughly saturated and soaked in. If you are treating hair on hide, make sure you only apply brain solution on the inner side of the hide, as it will make the hair slip if applied on the outer hairy side. Wait until the skin almost dries, then apply the brain solution again. Wait until skin dries again. Remove it from the frame and soak it in water again and then wring it out. Stretch it on the frame again.

But the skin doesn’t need to be stretched on the frame for brains to be applied to it. This is a very good series of videos showing how to apply brain solution on a skin stretch flat on the ground.

Softening

After the skin has completely dried out, it needs to be softened. This is done by simultaniously stretching and rubbing the skin. If the skin is stretched on the frame, the softening is done by pushing and scraping the hide with a blunt stick. You have to make sure that every bit of skin is pushed and shoved and scraped…

Otherwise you can use a pole, a tree stump, a rope or anything else that you can stretch the skin over and pull it from side to side. Here you can see softening of the hide on a stump.

Regardless how you decide to soften the hide, you have to keep the hide in motion stretching, pulling, pushing for a very very long time. This is a hard process which is continued until the hide is soft. If it gets hard in any places it is because those places dried without being in motion. Rehydrate that part the skin and continue to soften it until it is dry and loose.

Smoking

In order to make a brain tanned hide resistant to water, it has to be smoked. Otherwise the hide fibers would glue themselves back together again and the hide would become hard. The resins in the smoke penetrate the hide and prevent them from gluing them back together again if they get wet.

Smoking of hides is identical to cold smoking of meat. You need to place the hide on some kind of frame over a smoldering file. If you are smoking one hide or few hides you can just make a temporary tripod from sticks and spread the hide over it, inner side in.

Then you place the tripod over a fire. This needs to be a cool smoking fire made with punkwood. Punkwood is the wood from any tree that is in a stage of decay where it feels almost styrofoam-like in consistency… very light and slightly squishy.

You have to make sure that the smoke rising from the fire is cool and damp. If the smoke starts to feel dry add more punkwood. It the fire stops smoldering and starts to flame the hides will be ruined. Hides will need to be smoked like this for several hours. Or you can hang the hides under the roof of your wigwam or round house and let them smoke over constantly smoking heart fire. As I already wrote in my post about Curing = Smoking, this is probably how the curing ability of smoke was originally discovered. After the smoking is done, the brain tanned hide will be water resistent.

Urine tanning

In ancient history, tanning was considered a noxious or “odoriferous trade” and relegated to the outskirts of the town, among the poor. This is because Old Mediterranean and Messopotamian cultures for some reason thought that the best tanning agent was urine. And poo.

Is this why there are no fulachta fiadh inside villages?

Urine tanning is one of the oldest tanning methods. And one of the stinkiest. Urine tanning consists of dunking skins in a half – half mixture of water and urine and leaving them to soak for a period between 1 day (Source: “Leather – Preparation and Tanning by Traditional Methods” by Lotta Rahme) for fish skins to 30 days for hides with fur.

Why use urine? Urine contains ammonia, and ammonia is an amazing basic solvent that can break down fats and oils, clean surfaces and stop decay from forming. When our bodies and the bodies of all mammals break down amino acids as a part of normal metabolism, we produce ammonia. Since ammonia is toxic to us while in our bodies, our livers covert that ammonia into urea and salts, which we excrete in our urine. But that separation is only temporary. If you leave the urine to lie around for any amount of time, the urea and salts will start binding back together to form ammonia again. This is why it is the stale pee that is used in tanning.

In order to tan skin with urine, you need to have enough urine to completely submerge the skin in it and have it float without being tightly pressed. Basically what you want is that every bit of the skin is in contact with urine water mixture. For a salmon skin or a small animal like squirrel this means 4 – 8 liters of urine per skin. For larger animal skins you will need a lot more. Normal daily output of urine for an adult is one to two liters per person. So a group of 10 hunters would be able to collect say average 15 liters of urine a day. If an average fulacht fiadh trough contains about 200 liters, they would need 80 liters of urine to make 160 liters of urine water mixture and fill the trough. To collect this volume of pee would take about a week. And where you might ask yourself would the fianna collect their pee in? Well how about the fullacht fiadh trough…Every morning fianna members would emerge from their camp shelter, bloated from all the fulacht fiadh brewed beer they drank previous night. They would gather around the fulacht fiadh trough and then….

As I said, I would take a 10 man hunting band a week to 10 days to fill the trough. During that time they would skin killed animals, flesh and membrane the skins, rub them with urine or mixture of ash and urine to help get rid of hair (if they were making leather rather than pelts) and would then grain the skins wash them and dry them in the sun. These stable skins would then be stored in one of the shelters until the fulacht fiadh trough was full of pee.

Collection of urine for tanning is well documented, The so called “piss-pots” were located located on street corners, where human urine could be collected for use in tanneries or by washerwomen. So theoretically our fianna boys could have collected new urine in large beakers 🙂 while the skins were pickling in fulacht fiadh trough full of old urine. This way there would be no pause in the trough use…

Once the trough is filled the skins can be then be submerged in the tanning solution and left there until they have been properly tanned. After the skins are submerged and stirred the trough should be covered with hide pressed with stones to prevent excessive evaporation of ammonia.

You’ll check the skin every day and give it a stir. It shouldn’t smell too awful, and if it does, you need fresh solution because bacteria has set in. I couldn’t find any instruction how do you distinguish between awful and too awful…I guess years of smelling old pee baths filled with decomposing animal skins will teach you….

Once curing is finished, the skins need to be taken out of the trough. The trough would then need to be emptied of used pee water solution, as it should only be used once. And the new cycle of pee collection would start. As for hides, they would need to be thoroughly washed in water. Few times….It helps if its rubbed in with soap and then rinsed several times. Ancient Irish could have used soap made from camp fire ashes and animal fat. It is also possible to make a warm solution of soap mixture in water, let it cool and then soak the skins in it. You can then make a scented solution of strong smelling barks and flowers in water (tea) and then soak the skins in this water…North American Indians used this type of skin washing procedure after pee tanning. However, even after all this washing, the skin will stink like old pee when wet but as it dries that smell will go away. However some people say that it is the stink that goes away but the smell never really goes away…

Anyway, smelling or not, washed skins would then need to be dried properly. After that it would need to be oiled and stretched and softened. The urine tanning leaves skin very pale. So If you want to change the color of the skin, you can then tan it using vegetable tannins. And then smoked. And that is it.

Again, the use of fulacht fiadh trough as a tanning vat, could only have been possible providing trough was made watertight. If not the tanning solution would either be diluted or chemically changed by influx of water from the soil, if the fulacht fiadh was located on marshy, waterlogged terrain, or the tanning solution would disappear into the ground if the fulacht fiadh was located on dry well drained soil.

Bran (flour) and salt tanning

I came across another very interesting way of tanning pelts, which is not very well known: wheat (oat) tanning. This type of tanning was in Scandinavia used to tan sheep skin rugs, and in Serbia, Romania and probably other places for tanning sheep skin for coats. This is how you do it:

Scandianvia

Two handfuls of flour and one handful of salt was rubbed into the fleshed and membraned inner side of the skin. Then the skin was folded, a weight is put on and it was then left in a dry place to set for three days. After 3 days, the flour and salt were scraped off the skin and skin was stretched and broken until soft. Finished!

A skin treated like this will be white and relatively brittle. The Scandinavian rugs where used mainly as bed covers, if kept dry, they could last for a lifetime and more.

Romania

The process of tanning sheepskin was practiced by most of the peasants at home, with traditional techniques.

Boiled salty spring water (brine) was let to cool down. Oat flour and wheat bran were added, while stirring. The sheepskins were then treated with this mixture and folded, for 3 days. After 3 days, they were dried, then cleaned and stretched and softened.

Serbia

In Serbia salt and flour tanning is done in two ways: dry and wet.

Dry tanning

Stretch well washed, fleshed and membraned sheepskin or fur. Rub mixture of flour (bran) and salt into the inner (flesh) side. Leave the skin to dry in a draft our of the direct sun. Once the skin is completely dry tanning is done. The sheepskin or fur is then scraped, brushed and worked to soften.

Wet tanning

Bran and non ionized salt are poured into luck-warm water (40C) and is left to ferment for 3-4 days. You need 50 – 60 grams of bran and 70 grams of salt per liter of water. Once the tanning solution was ready, skins were submerged in it and left soaking for 1 to 2 weeks. After tanning is done, skins were taken out of the tanning solution, washed, dried, scraped, cleaned, brushed and then stretched, worked until soft. Metal containers and utensils react with salt and rust and should never be used in this type of tanning. So wooden tubs and wooden spatulas or sticks were traditionally used.

This second procedure could have easily been used for tanning furs in fulachta fiadh.

Fulacht fiadh troughs which were lined mostly with wooden planks and sometimes with stone plates are ideal containers for this type of tanning. For a 150 liter container (1 meter X 0.5 meter X 0.2 meter), which is an average size fulacht fiadh trough, you would need about 8 kilos of bran and about 11 kilos of salt. To prepare the tanning solution you could pour water into the trough and then heat it using fire heated stones. Once the water is cool enough to put your hand into it, bran and salt could be poured in and stirred. This bran soup would then be left in the covered trough for 3 – 4 days to ferment. The furs were then submerged in the through and pressed with logs so that they don’t float on the surface. The though would be covered again and furs would be left in the tanning solution for one to two weeks. They would be stirred and mixed from time to time to ensure that every part of the skin was in contact with tanning solution. When the tanning was finished, furs would be taken out, dried, scraped, cleaned, brushed and then stretched, worked until soft. The salt still remaining in the tanning solution could be reclaimed by dropping fire heated stones into the trough and boiling the water out.

After tanning skins were unintentionally smoked. This type of primitive tanning was done by peasants and they lived in very smoky houses with no chimneys. Like this one from Croatia.

Any skin worn or in any other way used in such houses would soon be completely impregnated with smoke resin and made resistant to elements…

This is a brilliant video showing traditional sheepskin tanning performed by three grandmothers in a village in Croatia. They actually only use salt as a preservative agent, but the procedure is the same as in salt + flour tanning.

Now we know that Bronze age Irish did grow grains, so they could have used either one of these methods for tanning furs using mixture of salt and bran (flour). By the way this is a very environmentally friendly way of tanning.

So, there you have it. Geoffrey Keating, in his 17th-century History of Ireland, says that during the winter the fianna were quartered and fed by the nobility, during which time they would keep order on their behalf, but during the summer, from Beltaine to Samhain, they were obliged to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell. If the Fianna really lived from hunting for pelts to sell, they had to be able to turn animal skins into durable, useful and good looking leather and pelts. To do that they had to preserve (tan) the skins. And as we have seen Fulachta fiadh could have been used as efficient tanneries (providing troughs were made watertight). So was this one of the usages of fulachta fiadh?